How I Returned to Painting and Built My Art Business
People often ask me when I decided to become an artist.
The honest answer is — I’m not sure I ever did.
It decided me.
There was no grand plan. No beautiful studio with north-facing light and the perfect easel. No single moment when I declared myself a painter and everything suddenly fell into place.
It was messier than that. More ordinary. More human.
It started at my kitchen table.
Paint squeezed onto whatever surface I could find. Brushes standing in old jam jars. The everyday chaos of life carrying on around me. The kettle boiling. The to-do list waiting. And me, stealing an hour — sometimes less — to do the one thing that made everything else feel quieter.
When the kitchen table wasn’t available, I found somewhere else. The shed. A corner of a room. Anywhere I could make a little space and lose myself in colour and movement for a while.
There were no rules about where art had to be made.
It just had to be made.
Looking back, that urgency was telling me something. I just hadn’t fully listened to it yet.
I had spent years in the corporate world, building a life that looked successful from the outside but increasingly felt disconnected from who I was becoming.
Then came Cornwall.
Cornwall had been calling me for a long time before I finally answered, and when I did, something shifted.
The coast here has a way of doing that.
The light changes constantly. Storms move in and disappear. The water can be dark and restless one moment, then completely still and luminous the next.
I found myself not simply looking at the landscape, but feeling it.
And wanting to paint that feeling.
What began at a kitchen table, in a shed and in borrowed corners of everyday life slowly became something I could no longer ignore.
The paintings grew bolder. The colour became more instinctive. I stopped trying to make things look a certain way and started trusting what felt right.
Somewhere along the way, I understood that painting wasn’t simply a hobby.
It was one of the most truthful things I had ever done.
Alongside painting, I was also building another creative life through interior design. For the past ten years I’ve worked with homes, colour, light, texture and space — and over time I realised that these two worlds were never really separate.
Whether I’m designing a room or creating a painting, I’m thinking about the same thing:
How does this make someone feel?
Through interior design, I’ve seen first-hand how colour, light, texture and artwork can completely change the atmosphere of a home. A room can feel calmer, warmer, more personal and more alive simply because the right elements have been brought together.
And painting has shaped the way I design in return.
One constantly feeds the other.
That is really where Sam Taylor Art grew from.
From a belief that colourful abstract art can do more than fill an empty wall.
It can change the energy of a room.
It can hold a memory.
It can remind you of a place, a feeling, a moment in your life.
And sometimes, it can simply give you somewhere beautiful to let your mind wander.
My paintings have always been drawn towards that space between movement and calm, between storm and stillness.
Perhaps because that is what I was looking for when I first picked up a brush again.
And it all started at a kitchen table in Cornwall, surrounded by the ordinary noise of everyday life, with no idea where any of it would lead.
I didn’t know it then, but picking up that brush was the beginning of everything.
